December 3, 2005

T-shirt of the day (in honor of the recently departed Pat Morita): "Nix-on, Nix-off". Sharp As Toast also gives away a free t-shirt to the high scorer of its online game (where you play as Calvin Coolidge, William Howard Taft, or Abraham Lincoln and try to avoid tacklers, I mean disease).

Greer, a former Guided by Voices bassist, proves to be too perfect a Boswell, endlessly forgiving Pollard's personality flaws, obsessing over the band's drinking habits and excretory functions, and making generally outrageous claims in overwrought language ("you could make the case that his body of work in general is one long screed against the dying of the light").

LAist: If you could give one piece of advice to a new band, what would it be and why?

Ian: Man, I don't feel wise enough to be giving out advice. But maybe "don't put too much stress on getting signed by a major label as if they are gonna solve all your problems—just do what you would be doing anyway. Getting signed should be a by-product."

Though Narducy had seen Guided by Voices several times, he didn't actually meet Pollard until the infamously prolific songwriter came to Chicago a couple weeks ago to sign copies of Guided by Voices: A Brief History at a Barnes & Noble. "We talked for ten minutes. And he was like, 'Do you want to do this thing?' I said yes, and now I have 50 songs to learn," says Narducy, laughing. "And I think that's just side one of the new record."

Well we recorded it in North Carolina at the Fidelitorium [with longtime DBT producer David Barbe], on the same tape deck that they used for Murmurs and all those cool old REM records, which I’m a big fan of. And we even got Mitch Easter to play on a song – which, actually, he’s playing on the single.

Tommy: We were driving in our van and we pulled into a rest stop. We went in to use the facilities and as we entered the rest stop owner comes up to our road manager and goes, "It's nice of you taking care of these retarded kids."